“The creative adult is the child who survived.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Ever since I was little, my life has unfolded within an artistic backdrop. Both of my parents studied interior, graphic, and fashion design at the same university, so I grew up surrounded by photographs, paintings, and all kinds of creative projects. By the time I was two years old, I was already experimenting with paint on canvases.
A year later, my mom began teaching creativity classes for children, and I became one of her first students. Creativity became part of my everyday rhythm. I would come home from the playground and, before even taking off my shoes or my hat, reach for my magnetic drawing board to sketch the impressions I had gathered from the outside world. My mom encouraged me to bring some of those sketches to life in color on canvas, while my dad photographed each creation and printed them into a small book.
One day, I was making a drawing in raccourci, a technical perspective technique that creates the illusion of depth, of two bicyclists viewed from the front, pedaling on water. A structural engineer had come by to do some work on our house, and when he saw my drawing, he told me that I must become an architect. What he said stayed with me. In that moment, at four and a half years old, my fate felt sealed. I had decided I wanted to be an architect, and since then, nothing and no one has been able to change that dream, not for a day, not even for an hour. By the age of eight, I had designed my first house using SketchUp. A few years later, I grew from being a student in my mother’s creativity workshops to stepping into the role of her assistant, coming full circle.
From there, the journey into the unknown continued, as my father likes to say, and that early curiosity never faded, only growing into new forms.
